THE SHORT-HORNED BUFFALO 791 



irritable, and more prone to charge than ordinary. At the same tiriie, the pursuit is 

 far from being unaccompanied by danger; and Sir J. Willoughby states that of all the 

 animals met with by him in Eastern Africa ' ' the buffalo is probably the most cun- 

 ning and dangerous to attack; they become very savage when wounded, and usually 

 take to the thick bush, where they lie in wait for their foe. The greatest care should 

 be taken in following them up, as, on account of the denseness of the bush, it is next 

 to impossible for the hunter to avoid the sudden charge that is almost sure to ensue 

 if the buffalo sights him first. A cow can be killed by a bullet anywhere on the 

 forehead or behind the ear; but a bull is practically invulnerable in the head, although 

 it may be dropped by a lucky shot striking above the eyes in the narrow line of di- 

 vision between the horns." 



THE SHORT-HORNED BUFFALO {Bos pumilus') 



The short-horned, or red buffalo, of which one variety is represented in the 

 figure on p. 790, and a second in the illustration on the next page, is a smaller animal 

 than the Cape species, from which it is further distinguished by its smaller and much 

 less massive horns, as well as by its more abundant and lighter-colored hair. This 

 buffalo is a West-African species, and is known to the natives as the niari, and to 

 the Europeans of the west coast as the bush cow. It is found in most of the tropical 

 regions where the Cape buffalo is unknown, and is essentially a forest-dwelling ani- 

 mal. The height of the animal is, as a rule, inferior to that of the Cape buffalo. 

 The color of the hair is generally some shade of yellow or red, but more rarely 

 brown, although some individuals are much darker and nearly black. The specimen 

 figured in the illustration on p. 790, which came fram Sierra Leone, and was exhib- 

 ited in the Zoological Gardens at Antwerp, in 1875, was light yellow above but red- 

 dish on the under parts, with a sharp line of demarcation between the two areas. 

 It will be observed from the figure that the horns are but little flattened, and are 

 separated from one another by a wide interval on the forehead, and have a simple 

 curvature; these features being apparently distinctive of all the specimens from the 

 northwestern portion of the creature's range. On the other hand, when we pass 

 southward into the Congo district, we find that these buffaloes, as shown in our 

 second illustration, have the horns much more flattened and expanded at their bases, 

 where they are closely approximated in the middle line. Their tips are also curved 

 sharply upward and inward, terminating in a point. This variety, which is also of 

 rather larger size than the other, was described as B. centralis, and approximates to 

 the northern variety of the Cape buffalo. Indeed with some of the specimens from 

 Central Equatorial Africa it is difficult to find constant characteristics by which they 

 can be distinguished on the one hand from the typical niari, with widely-separated and 

 slightly-flattened horns, and on the other from the northern variety of the Cape buf- 

 falo. Hence it is probable that the present species is in reality nothing more than a 

 geographical race of the latter. Reduced in size and otherwise modified by the differ- 

 ence in its habitat. We have indications of the commencement of such a modification 

 in the case of the "wood bison " of North America, and there is no reason why such 



